So, after helping The Jarl of Winterhold retrieve The Helm of Winterhold, like every other Jarl, he said that I'd become Thane of Winterhold if I help out his people. So I went around accepting as many quests as I could (the Yngo Barrow one was annoying and useless because I found out that it wasn't a quest after I cleared it) and I talked to the Inn Keeper, Horan (or Haran?) and Ranmir about Isabelle Rolaine. I found out that I had to go to Riften, but I'm not actually sure if that would do anything. Because when I pulled up the Quest Log, it didn't pop-up as a mainquest or a sidequest (misc). And I know that the article says that this is a bug, but I'm wonering if I can still do the quest, or if going to Riften will just be a waste of time.

I'm a Thane of Winterhold and I didn't do the Isabelle quest, though I'll probably do it later to give Ranmir closure. Get on his good side because if he dies in a dragon attack, maybe he'll leave you an inheritance, What I did to get Winterhold's respect was pay Ranmir's debt and buy him a lot of drinks, listened to Haran and Dagur's concern over Ranmir, ocssionaly bought inn-keeper food, purchased items from Birna, helped a few mages at the college, and retrieved the Helm of Winterhold.

My son and I joke that we (splitting one character) are the Forrest Gump of Skyrim.

We somehow not only managed to become Thane of Winterhold and get the sword once without even being aware Ramnir still had a quest, we stopped to collect a bounty from the Jarl (was he the new one because we won for the Imperials?), he made us Thane again, granting us a second blade.

Stick with me, we'll Gump some more.

Somehow, since we had already stolen Nelacor's staff long since and stuck it in a chest (just .. because), when we spoke to Malur and agreed to help him, that quest auto-completed, and since we didn't have the staff on us, we got to keep the staff anyway.

So, we headed to the tavern to see if there was another bounty quest to get from the innkeeper, and he told us of Ramnir's plight. We spoke to him and got the dialog about Isabelle, but no quest came up in the journal, so I confused it with one we had already completed (swimming to retrieve a locket from a skeleton) and figured it was another bug.

Gump one more step.

Our next stop (with no help from the wiki, I swear) was to drop off a Burglary item to Vex, and she pushed us one more step to finding Isabelle within five minutes. Still no quest in the journal, but Hob's Fall was on my map, so I thought 'why not?'

The rest, as most have noted, was a completely unrecorded good deed of giving Ramnir peace of mind ... or a lifelong regret.

To top it all off, the woman we had earlier rescued in Hob's Fall from the Necromancers had apparently never left the cave, and was sacrificed ANYWAY by the next respawn of Necromancers ... so that cave is not my favorite place.